SEO Strategy that Works
ginzametrics.com
ginzametrics.com
1) To the extent that someone is actually searching for Farmville, it is because their business/media juggernaut already has succeeded in reaching that person. Everything after that is about filling transactional intent, which is much less complicated since Zynga has and always will have a total lock on transactions with their brand.
2) Game companies have a lot of difficulty getting non-branded queries to work as a distribution channel. Really, what would you type in to find Farmville prior to finding Farmville. "online farming game"? That's probably near the head of the distribution, and if you rank #1 for it that will get you a few dozen signups a month. That won't move the needle for Zynga. You also probably couldn't scale your way to meaningful numbers through X,000 pieces of content with each one converting a handful of people. So you either go with industrial scale generation and become Demand Media, or you go with the much surer viral/paid ad channels.
SEO is really, really good at answering specific needs your prospective customers know they have (Demand Media really, really gets this at a fundamental level). Games typically don't work like that, transactional/navigational queries aside.
Of possible note: there are quite a few publishers cashing in on Zynga's lackluster SEO efforts by creating pages responsive to queries like [farmville strategies], [farmville crops], and the like. Those get decent volume but wouldn't result in new account creation. Monetization seems to be a mix of affiliate products and generic backfill AdSense like, e.g., Evony.
As you mention, there is opportunity for 3rd parties and this will increase as brands get further involved. I think it's all still new enough that the needs for (insert search term here) in the context of gaming have not yet been created, but I believe this will change over the next few years.
For one thing, areas that everybody thinks are "monetizable" often have huge amounts of content chasing a small advertising spend, resulting in very low eCPM.
Then there are capricious factors that are very specific to the niche. You do better with a Chevy forum than a Cadillac forum because the real money is in ads for aftermarket parts -- Caddy enthusiasts like OEM parts, so nobody wants to advertise to them. (GM doesn't, since people on Caddy forums are already sold on the brand and know more about the next crop of Caddies coming out than the dealers do.)
Overall, web publishers cheat themselves out of ad revenue by choosing topics the way they do. If you threw a dart at the "encyclopedia of the situation" and picked a random topic you'd get better than average results!
Personally I'm delighted by the increasing use of behavioral targeting technology: I'm finding that behavioral targeting is greatly raising the revenue I get from my worst performing sites.
Can you please elaborate on that?
Contextual ads work well on a site for which the text is predictive of what ads will make money; for instance, in the case of a car forum, you can figure out what kind of cars are being talked about, if they are fixing up drivers, if they are racing, whatever.
Contextual ads work poorly on sites (like Facebook) that aren't really about any topic in particular -- because the text isn't predictive of anything. Also, in some cases, you can predict accurately what ads are likely to make a profit, but the profit isn't much.
Behavioral ads to the rescue -- the ad network sticks a cookie on your and tracks your interests over the long term. Although contextual ads are (overall) better targeted, a network like Adsense that does both can guess which will perform best for a particular impression, raising earnings for publishers and the networks.
Behavioral ads take many forms, but my favorite form right now are ones that are integrated with the shopping process. For instance, if you spend some time on Zappos, you might find ads for Zappos on other sites that feature the sort of products you were looking at. (Right now I'm thinking about what the next Gamecube RPG I'm going to buy next, so it would be logical for AMZN to try to tempt me to close the deal)
Anyway, Google added behavioral targeting and third party ad networks a few months ago -- publishers don't need to do anything special to benefit... we just get bigger checks!
What type of Adsense ads do you use (text, image)?
Of course, a lot of SEO is more focused on "get my ranking up, no matter what". In a world where everyone uses black hat techniques, it's AT BEST a zero sum game (more realistically, everyone loses, because search engines become useless and then everyone stops using them).
And yes, the more people that know a particular SEO strategy make it less effective, or in certain cases, your site can be "google slapped".
I recommend using a small PPC budget to determine your actual keywords that convert for you, then optimize for the search engines based on those results.
It can take several months to gain momentum through SEO, so you should pay a few dollars to determine where best to put your keyword efforts.
The high volume, monetizable keywords are more easily defined, and within that sector, the game may be more "zero-sum". Outside in this vague "new search" sector, any person who throws thousands of content pages and gets links will be able to drive a decent amount of traffic. How much, though, is up for debate.
It's a moving target, but if you don't keep taking shots at it, you better have a product that is HEAD AND SHOULDERS above your competition on some other level.